STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery

Peace Prosperity And Friendship With All Nations

Artist Profile

Chong has taken the phrase from the Brexit Coin and reimagined it through the typography of a sign he found above an artspace in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 2018, the artist and a group of curators from the Netherlands encountered an artwork outside the Cemeti Art Foundation. The artwork’s script appeared to ooze a viscous fluid akin to curdled blood. Recalling the typography of horror comics from the 1950s, an era in which the monstrous was a cipher for the Cold War anxieties of ‘otherworldly’ invasions, the sign as translated by Ade Darmawan, an Indonesian curator and artist, read: “The Dutch are coming".

In applying the associated font to a phrase commemorating Brexit and which quotes American founding father Thomas Jefferson, Chong overlaps the volitions of the art world and a broader world, conflating two existential crises. First, that of the ‘Dutch’ curators confronted with a sign that horrifyingly declares the return of the Dutch, implicating the said curators in the legacies of Dutch colonisation of Indonesia (1800-1949); and second, that of the misplaced imperial imaginary of Brexit.